(Roughly) Daily

Yesterday’s post located our moment in the larger sweep of time; today’s locates our experience– the things we can touch and see– in the larger hierarchy of scale.

Readers may recall Cary and Michael Huang’s “The Scale of the Universe”— in the spirit of xkcd’s nifty toon, a wonderful Flash re-do of Charles and Ray Eames’ classic Powers of Ten: an animation that lets one scroll through the orders of magnitude of existence.  Not content with “pretty terrific,” the Brothers Huang have revised and improved their tour of the universe…  Ladies and Gentlemen, “The Scale of the Universe 2“:

[TotH to friend CE]

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As we ruminate with reverence on our place in the scheme of things, we might spare a thought for Bede (or as he is more frequently remembered, Venerable Bede); he died on this date in 735.  An English monk, Bede studied and wrote widely on scientific, historical and theological topics, ranging from music and metrics to exegetical Scripture commentaries. He was an accomplished translator (Pliny the Elder, Virgil, Lucretius, Ovid, Horace, and other classical writers in both Greek and Hebrew).  His  Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People) has earned him the title “The Father of English History.” Indeed, it was in this work that Bede established as common practice the use of “BC” and “AD” with dates.

Bede as depicted in the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493

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